Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she is taking to (a) support and (b) scale-up local health systems in the Global South.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of building strong and resilient health systems to protect against health threats, achieve universal health coverage and ending the preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children. We are supporting health systems to manage the primary and secondary impacts of the pandemic by flexing our funding and programming. This builds on our long-term investments to strengthen and scale up health systems through: technical assistance and financial support directly to countries; supporting the World Health Organisation, global health initiatives and other agencies to provide technical assistance and programmes; and funding research and new products that increase access and reduce prices for essential health commodities.